In the production of secondary documents, quoting and citing the written work of another author is a common practice. However, inaccurate or incomplete quotes and citations, as well as outright plagiarism may also be a common practice. Publishers of written works typically desire both a wide audience and accurate citation of published works, and these goals can often conflict with each other. For example, a publisher may have articles that the publisher wants to publish to potential readers while ensuring that the articles are fully and correctly cited when users copy quotes from the articles. Conventionally, the publisher of a web-based article displays the article text and citation information in a web page. Citation information may be embedded within the article itself or may be located separately from the article, for example, on a web page accessible via a hyperlink in the article.
Typically, a user viewing a web page may wish to create a secondary document that includes selected material from the source document. For example, a college student may have the task of writing a paper and, during his or her research, the user may locate and select quotes from the source article, copy the text to the system clipboard, and paste the text from the clipboard into a word processing application.
In addition to quoting the selected source material, users may cite the author of the source material by listing the title of the source material, the publication date, the author's name, the publication volume number, issue number, and other pieces of information which identify the source document, or identify the author or publisher of the source document. These citations may be formatted as parenthetical citations, footnotes, endnotes, citation references, bibliographies, reference sections, or other formats in the user's secondary document.
According to one conventional method, the user may manually quote and cite the portion of text from the web-based article by selecting text from existing source documents and either copying and pasting the objects in a word processing application or hand transcribing the text and citations into the destination document. According to the “copy and paste” method, a user may copy an article displayed as web page, PDF, or other electronically formatted document and paste it into a destination document. As used herein, “copy and paste” refers to a series of steps performed by a computer user to copy objects from a source document into a destination document wherein the user selects an object (such as text or image), keys Ctrl-C, moves the insertion point to a new position in the same or another document, and keys Ctrl-V. There are several problems with the current methods of copying and pasting objects and citation information from a source document to a destination document.
One problem with conventional methods of copying and pasting quoted material from a source document to a destination document is that the user may choose not to cite the source of the object.
Another problem with conventional methods of copying and pasting quoted material from a source document to a destination document is that the user may mistype the citation information in the user's new document.
Another problem with conventional methods of copying and pasting quoted material from a source document to a destination document is that the user may omit important citation information about the objects in the user's new document.
Another problem with conventional methods of copying and pasting quoted material from a source document to a destination document is that the user must hand-format citations because many document processing applications do not have automatic citation formatting features.
Another problem with conventional methods of copying and pasting quoted material from a source document to a destination document is that the user may improperly format or inconsistently format citations in the user's new document.
For example, users, such as students, may be under time pressures to write and submit documents by a deadline. Because late papers are either not accepted or are penalized, students may decide to skip citing sources in order to quickly complete an assignment and submit the assignment for grading by the deadline. Users of periodicals or other publications (which are published on a deadline) may elect to leave out citations in order to hand in the articles by the submission deadline. Omitting citation information can result in: students being expelled from school or college, professional users being fired, users' fees being withheld, users being asked to return writing fees, or damage to a user's career or credibility. Additionally, a publisher, such as a university, a newspaper, a book publisher, or other high-profile publishers may have its reputation tarnished by publishing documents which are not properly cited.
There are several computer automated systems or features of document processing applications for handling or formatting citations. However, these systems do not provide all the features required to correctly and fully cite objects copied from a source document.
For web-based systems, the user may locate a book, journal, or article from which the user wants to cite an object. The system displays any citation information, such as: title, author's name, publisher, publication date, city of publication, etc, known to the system. Then, the user has the option of adding information for missing fields, or the user can change the citation information. The system formats the citation and the user can copy the formatted citation into the user's document. For document processing applications which provide bibliography formatting features, the citation information is simply formatted in a bibliography. There are several significant disadvantages to these systems.
One problem associated with conventional systems for automatically generating and/or formatting citation information is that the user might elect to not cite the selected objects. For example, because citing quoted material is not a requirement for inserting the quoted material into a secondary document according to conventional systems, a user may include quoted material but choose not to cite it.
Another problem associated with conventional systems for automatically generating and/or formatting citation information is that the user might change the citation information. Because citation information produced by conventional systems is editable by the user in a word processing application, the user may alter the citation information.
Another problem associated with conventional systems for automatically generating and/or formatting citation information is that the user might leave out important citation information. For example, a user may accurately quote selected material and, for the citation information provided, the citation may be accurate. However, the citation information may be incomplete, thus rendering the citation less valuable than a citation which is ensured to be both accurate and complete.
Another problem associated with conventional systems for automatically generating and/or formatting citation information is that potential readers and/or publishers of secondary documents that include quoted material cannot be sure that the secondary document has correctly quoted and cited the primary material. For example, a university professor may desire an easy, convenient, and secure method for ensuring that each paper written by his students contains accurate and complete quotations and citation information. However, conventional solutions are directed to plagiarism detection, and do not provide any indication that the quotation and citation information has been unaltered by the student. Rather, conventional systems typically include only after-the-fact detection mechanisms for comparing documents submitted by students to a database of known materials in order to determine if any duplication/overlap exists. If any material is duplicated, the professor may be automatically alerted to the possibility of plagiarism.
Outside of the scope of academics, there exists a need for an automation in the transfer of electronic media. Modern Internet users typically share and store information. The process for doing so is cumbersome and outdated. When a user wishes to share or store both the content and “back-end information” (e.g., Title, Author, Hyperlink, etc.) associated with any piece of electronic media, multiple steps are required. A user may wish to share or store information instantly from any web-enabled device. The information should be accessible and easy to manipulate. Modern Internet users may also demand that the destination of this information take the form of multiple applications. Although the automated citation system described above automatically generates some citation information regarding a source document, the only repository for the citation or the quoted information is the destination document itself, and the only associations between the citation and the copied information are in the source and destination documents. In such a system, a third party cannot verify the citation if the source web page from which the quoted information was copied changes.
In light of these difficulties, there exists a long felt need for methods, systems, and computer readable media for automatically and securely citing and transferring electronically formatted information and for maintaining association between the cited or transferred information and back-end information.